Han Kang’s interview with the New York Times

Han Kang’s interview with the New York Times. January. 22, 2025 07:45. by ????? teller@donga.com.
“Walking around the streets to observe how people live and writing with animosity is the best environment for a writer,” says Han Kang (photo), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year.

With her book ‘We Do Not Part’ published in the U.S. this week, Han met with the New York Times for an online interview. “I’ve spent most of my time away from the public spotlight, thinking about what recently happened,” she said on Tuesday, according to the New York Times. ‘We Do Not Part,’ her novel depicting the massacres of the Jeju uprising in 1948, is published by Hogarth of Random House, which has introduced Han’s works to the West.

She has refrained from individual interviews since receiving the Nobel Prize."I am trying to return to a quiet writing life and writing in a sunny room overlooking a small yard. I can see the snow in the wind blanketing the wildflowers that I planted,” she said. New York Times described that her “winning the Nobel Prize was celebrated (in Korea) like an Olympic gold medal” and that “her son, who is in his 20s, was so disturbed by excessive attention that he asked not to be mentioned in the interview.”

The article also introduced an anecdote about how Han, who debuted as a poet, devotes effort into selecting sentences and words when writing novels. She is said to have had intense discussions with the editor, down to every syllable, during the editing process of the novel ‘Human Acts’). The writer jokingly told her editor not to change any syllables, even though the grammar might not be perfect, if an unexpected accident occurred to her.